Sawny's answer is a great one that really leverages the power of the Blade syntax well, except I would take it a step further. You can use Blade::extend to create your own Blade @ shortcodes so I use the following:

EDIT: I realized someone coming across this may very well wonder, "Where do I put the Blade::extend function?"

To be honest, it can go in a lot of places (and it depends on if you're using Laravel 4 or 5 as to the 'best' approach).

A simple place to put it is in the routes.php or global.php files as they will get picked up with the least effort. These are however, not the best files to put them in and you would be best off learning to create Laravel Providers.